13 Skim As Girl Reading a Japanese North American Graphic Novel Through Manga Lenses
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13 Skim as Girl Reading a Japanese North American Graphic Novel through Manga Lenses Jaqueline Berndt Introduction In recent years, graphic narratives1 in general and manga in particular have attracted critical attention from a variety of felds, including media and globali- zation research as well as Japanese, gender, and ethnic studies. Tis broadening of topic-oriented interest usually leads to two lines of contestation, one pertain- ing to manga-specifc expertise and the other to culturally divergent mediascapes as contexts of productions and use. Taking a typical case of discordance—the ethnic identity of manga characters—opinions difer notoriously as to whether mangaesque faces and physiques are to be regarded as “stateless” (mukokuseki) or “Caucasian.” Te latter position may meet manga experts’ resistance if it leans on a preference for visual clues over verbal markers of race. In addition, manga researchers show a strong inclination to tie the meanings that specifc graphic narratives imply to the respective mediascape, emphasizing the gap between diferent national comics cultures or, within those, mainstream and alternative comics as well as manga genres.2 Recently, they have also questioned the signifcance of representational content, for example in consideration of the increasing role of non-representational usages of manga texts in the form of fan art and CosPlay. From such a pragmatic perspective, mangaesque faces appear to be transcultural platforms rather than manifestations of Japanese Occidentalism3 or representations of Japan’s obliviousness of its past as an invader and colonizer in Asia. Yet, contesting the pragmatic approach by means of representational critique or vice versa does not seem to provide a satisfactory solution. After all, mangaesque faces are neither “neutral” nor “Westernized” but both, and it is precisely their ambiguity which calls for consideration. An interesting case in this regard is Girl, the Japanese translation of Jillian Tamaki4 and Mariko Tamaki’s Skim, which shall serve as my example below. 258 Drawing New Color Lines Girl is one of only two comics volumes by Japanese (North) American artists that have been published in Japanese so far, the other being Adrian Tomine’s Sleepwalk and Other Stories. Neither of them has attracted much attention in Japan5 despite the fact that they both are rendered in black and white and thereby recommend themselves to a Japanese readership for whom mono- chromy is more familiar than full color.6 But while Tomine’s publisher refrained from conforming to Japanese manga conventions, the editor of Girl excelled in trying to adjust a foreign graphic novel to domestic standards: the hardcover Groundwood edition7 was transformed into a handy soft cover tankōbon8 and girted with a typically Japanese paper belt (obi) which announced, “It sucks to be 16” (Plates 20 and 21). Further noteworthy as a diference from the Japanese edition of Sleepwalk, whose lettering looks even more hand drawn than in the English language original, is the replacement of the freehand font in Skim by phototypesetting in Girl (Figures 16 and 17).9 Yet, as well-intentioned and courageous as such assimilative eforts were, they did not succeed in appeal- ing to manga readers. Tis chapter pursues why, highlighting the importance of media-cultural considerations as an intermediary between social discourses— on ethnicity for example—and the comics form. Te frst section reviews English-language scholarship on Asian American graphic narratives from a manga studies point of view. Te second section takes a closer look at Skim as Girl, foregrounding the way in which it evokes similarities with Japanese girls’ comics (shōjo manga) and escapes generic frameworks at the same time. To non-manga experts, manga appears usually as one genre within the larger arena of graphic narratives, but manga readers in and outside of Japan regard it as a media which encompasses a wide variety of genres. As such, manga is comparable to Hollywood cinema although categorized less by subject matter (romance, science fction, mystery, etc.) than by readerships’ gender and age (shōnen/boys’ manga, seinen/youth manga and others). In contrast to the second section’s focus on genre, the third and fnal section turns to issues of realist representation and visual identity, precisely protagonist Skim’s conspicu- ously “Japanese” visage which, deviating from mangaesque faces as it does, may serve as a gateway to questioning the post/racial condition of both Skim’s world and that of manga, especially shōjo manga. “Asian American Graphic Narratives” in Focus Te term “Asian American graphic narratives” implies a two-fold interest: an interest in comics as graphic narratives and an ethnically specifed interest Skim as Girl 259 Figure 16 Hand lettering in Skim, p. 19. House of Anansi Press/ Groundwood Books, 2008. Figure 17 Phototypesetting in Girl, p. 23. @ Sanctuary 2009. 260 Drawing New Color Lines in such narratives. Shan Mu Zhao, for example, defnes Asian American comics as “part of an ethnic subculture” (12). In North American academia, such comics have been attracting scholarly attention mainly with respect to their possible contribution to “recent debates about the politics of race within a supposedly post-ethnic or post-identity context” (Oh 131).10 Approached from a diferent location, this critical orientation reveals limitations, on the one hand, with respect to the cultural (i.e., geopolitical) scope of its topic, and on the other hand, with respect to the “general emphasis on content and representation” (LaMarre, qtd. in Smith 143). To begin with the latter, scholars engaged in comics studies face the following problem: [I]nvestigating comics’ intersections with, say, theories of gender or postco- lonialism, political and social issues, accounts of history and psychoanalyti- cal methods . reveal[s] more about those discourses and social structures than they do about the comics medium per se. (Miodrag, “Narrative, Language, and Comics-as-Literature” 265) Increasingly, however, the paramount concern with how Asian Americans are represented in graphic narratives does not always privilege artists’ descent, char- acters’ phenotypes, and ethnicity-related subject matter. More and more essays in literary studies exhibit an awareness of the aesthetic properties of graphic narratives, intertwining their topic-oriented fndings with the distinctiveness of comics. Exemplary in this regard is Sandra Oh, who asserts, “As such, both racial identity and the graphic novel depend on hegemonically determined nar- ratives, or closure, and the reiteration of these narratives” (144). Referring to Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics: Te Invisible Art, her analysis of Tomine’s short stories concludes that they are “working against closure within a medium enabled by closure” (149). Likewise, Derek Parker Royal fnds a paradoxical efect of ethnic identifcation in comics: Graphic narrative, in allowing the reader to “mask” him- or herself in its non-mimetic fguration, invites empathy with the nondescript “Other” on the comic page, thereby encouraging the reader to connect to other experiences and other commu- nities that might otherwise have been unfamiliar. (10) Remarkably, McCloud’s notions of closure and masking efect are presumed to apply universally to any reading of graphic narratives. Tis inclination dove- tails with Hillary Chute’s sophisticated account that comics hold a “particular value for articulating a feminist aesthetics” due to their fragmented form (8). Aesthetically characterized by the interplay between the visual and the verbal Skim as Girl 261 and, closely related, the interrelation between presence and absence, comics as such are ascribed a special potential to challenge binary classifcation. Chute “understand[s] the very form of comics as feminized” (10), reminiscent of earlier attempts at claiming an écriture féminine for literature.11 It is important to note that Chute’s argumentation addresses itself implicitly to non-comics readers. Against the assumption that graphic narratives do not provide complex stories, she calls for acknowledging them as “a constant self-refexive demystifcation of the project of representation” (9). Tis, however, can apparently be achieved only by works that “push against easy consumption” (26), a bias which implies a constraint of the initially claimed universals. If aesthetic universals existed, they would have to hold for all variants of comics, from the highly idiosyncratic to the easily consumable. Critics’ penchant towards universals often coalesces with uncritical refer- ences to the few available theories of graphic narratives and with a certain igno- rance towards discussions of these theories’ shortcomings by comics studies experts. Tis applies, frst of all, to McCloud. His initial defnition of comics has been criticized for overemphasizing the pictorial aspects of graphic narra- tives at the expense of the interplay between image and script.12 Furthermore, its formalism and disregard of “how and where a comics was published, in which materiality a specifc sequence of signs manifests itself, in which context it operates,” have prompted German critic Ole Frahm to speak of “semiotic idealism” (Die Sprache des Comics 17). A. David Lewis, for example, has addition- ally highlighted the “omitted viewer/reader” (75). Encompassing publication sites, genre traditions, and reader expectations, mediascape elements sway the potential of a specifc graphic narrative to facili- tate resistance